The Calling (8 page)

Bethany had created a mental list of considerable length. She had noticed that whenever she started to push the sisters to make decisions about getting rid of things, they would send her off to another room. So far, she had made a dent in practically every room, but not much more than a dent. Well, this house was in for the cleaning of its life, no matter how long it took. The deacon had asked them to take a turn hosting church, but fortunately, he hadn’t given them an actual date. Cleaning out this house might take over a year.

Bethany had gone back to work at the Sisters’ House today, as soon as Jimmy Fisher had come by to let her know the trunk of human bones mystery was sorted out—and she and the sisters and Jimmy actually did have a good laugh over it. Jimmy, especially, but she thought he found most everything amusing. Especially when she looked to be the fool. She did her best not to get riled at him for laughing at her and she didn’t say anything about his bad character. Hardly much at all, anyway.

But Jimmy Fisher was a man of his word. He had hauled the trunk of bones away and donated them to the college in Lancaster.

This morning, to her surprise, the sisters asked her to stop working inside and start on the outbuilding that once housed the buggies. They were heading off for the day—and after the bones in the basement fiasco, they didn’t want to leave her alone in the main house. She wasn’t sure if they were worried she would find more creepy things, or if she would toss out too much without their knowledge. Both, she presumed.

She didn’t mind working outside for a while, especially on such a hot summer morning, and hoped the carriage house would be cooler than the house. At least she’d get some fresh
air. She needed to air out her brain too—her thoughts felt all jumbled up.

She wished she could talk to her brother Tobe. Where was he, anyway? Was he still with their mother? How had he found her? Where had she been living all these years?

Bethany mulled over all the questions she’d harbored about her mother. What was she like? Did she ever ask Tobe about Bethany? Then there was the biggest question of all . . . why did she leave in the first place?

All those thoughts were scrambling through Bethany’s head instead of the one thought that should have been there:
Get to work!

She opened the door to the carriage house and took a deep breath. There was barely room to walk. The sisters didn’t keep horses any longer, but there was a dusty old buggy, leaning against the wall. “I don’t know where to begin.”

“It is a bit of a pickle.” Sylvia, the youngest sister, had come up behind her and stood by the doorjamb. Ella joined her, then Fannie and Ada. The women peered into the cluttered space, hands on their hips, taking it all in. “It’s all Lena’s doing,” Fannie said. “She’s crazy about tag sales. Brings home all kinds of worthless junk.”

That wasn’t the whole truth, Bethany knew. So far, Fannie blamed the clutter problem on Ella, who blamed Ada, who blamed Lena, who blamed Sylvia, who blamed Fannie. Bethany thought all the ladies had clutter problems, but who was she to say? She was paid handsomely for sifting through all kinds of interesting things. Even the trunk full of bones was interesting. Frightening, creepy . . . but interesting.

“Mim, maybe you can keep a look out for my thimble,” Ella said.

Fannie drew in a chest-heaving sigh. “This is Bethany, Ella. Mim’s sister.”

Ella gave her head that little shake. “Where’s Mim?”

“She had something she had to do.” Something to do with Mrs. Miracle. Bethany had brought a cardboard box from the house and set it in the shade of the carriage house. “What would you like me to do with all the things in the discard boxes?” She was trying to be as diplomatic as possible. “I thought we might plan on having a yard sale of your own.”

“What a good idea!” Sylvia said. “But we’ll have to discuss it first.”

Of course, of course. Everything was decided by committee in this household. A long, endless committee of indecision.

Ella and Fannie and Ada walked over to join Lena by the front door. They were heading off somewhere—they always had places to go and Bethany didn’t know where.

Only Sylvia remained. “It will be nice to have this place cleaned out. Papa would have been so pleased. He always intended to clean out this carriage house.”

Oh, great. That’s just great.
That meant this carriage house hadn’t been cleaned out in at least thirty years. What might be crawling around in here? Several generations of mice and snakes and spiders. Bethany looked around the dusty carriage house, at the thick cobwebs clinging to the corners, at the smudged windows. She shuddered.

“We’re off, then,” Sylvia said. “Won’t be back until after three. Ella needs her afternoon nap.”

Ella, the eldest sister, was ninety-two and never without a sweet smile on her face. Sylvia said she put her love in things beyond herself, and that kept her spirits high.

Bethany nodded. “Have a good day.”

Then Sylvia leaned close to Bethany and placed her wrinkled hands on her arms, peering at her with mortal seriousness. The top of her head only reached the tip of Bethany’s chin, but there was no shortage of stature in Sylvia’s tone when she spoke up like this. “You mustn’t blame yourself or look back—not any longer than it takes to learn what you must learn. After that, let it go. The past is past. But you’re still here,” she whispered urgently and exerted a gentle pressure on Bethany’s arms. “And I’m glad. You be glad too.”

Tears sprang in Bethany’s eyes. How did Sylvia know how troubled she’d been feeling this summer? She’d never said a word.

Sylvia gave the carriage house one more look-over and waved her hand. “Oh goodness—this old carriage house can wait another week. What would you think about helping us today? We could always use an extra pair of hands, especially at the end of the month.”

Bethany wiped away a tear. “I’m all yours.”

“Excellent!” Sylvia said. “The more the merrier for this project.” She pointed to two little red children’s wagons, filled with food, waiting on the front walk. “You can help us pull those wagons.”

“Where are we going?”

“To the Grange Hall. To make lunch.”

Bethany was about to ask why, but decided against it. She’d find out soon enough.

Like any town, Stoney Ridge had good areas and not-so-good areas. The Sisters’ House, one of the oldest in the area, was in the not-so-good area. As the town grew, the original area became run-down and neglected. The Sisters’ House was only a block from the main road. The Grange Hall stood at
the corner. On one side of the Grange was a vacant lot. On the other side of the Grange was a group home for wayward teenage girls. The entire block looked tired and worn-out and neglected.

As the women pulled the wagons past the Group Home, Bethany looked at the house more carefully than she ever had. No one tended the grass. There were no flowers in pots, no curtains on the windows. A television screen, always on, could be seen from the road.

Hopeless. That’s what the house looked and felt like. It seemed a little disturbing to Bethany, as if the house had a personality of its own—which was ridiculous—but the sisters just waved to the wayward girls and walked right on by it. Only one of the wayward girls waved back.

When they got to the Grange Hall, they went around back and parked the wagons by the kitchen door. “We’ll need to take a few trips to get all that food inside.”

“That’s an awful lot of food for lunch for you,” Bethany said.

“It’s not for us.” Sylvia walked up the three steps and unlocked the kitchen door. “We run a soup kitchen for the folks in Stoney Ridge who are a little down on their luck.”

Fannie put a large bottle of Dr Pepper at the base of the door to hold it open. “A few years back, when the recession hit head-on, we sisters kept seeing a need in this town. So we talked to the fellow who had the keys for the Grange and he told us we could use the kitchen to serve the hungry. Once a week, everybody in Stoney Ridge who’s in need gets a hot meal.”

That
, Bethany thought, would be a very small group. She didn’t know a soul in Stoney Ridge who was in need.

Lena read her mind. “Child, look out the window.”

Bethany turned to see what she was talking about. She could see into the backyard of the Group Home. Five or six girls sat at a picnic bench, a few of them smoking. “You mean, you feed
them
?”

“That home is for girls who are in trouble, or their parents are. There’s a woman whose job is housemother. She does her best with what the county gives, but it’s not enough to stretch the week.”

“So how many people come for a lunch?” Bethany asked. “Those five?”

“Anywhere from twenty to thirty-five,” Fannie said. “Busier at the end of the month when food stamps run out.”

Ada handed Bethany a bag of onions. “And we send out five meals to the homebound. Can’t forget them.”

Bethany was shocked.

“We cook most things from scratch,” Fannie added.

“A good cook starts from scratch and keeps on scratching.” Ella chuckled at her own joke while Fannie gave her a look like she was sun-touched.

“We haul the wagons over here and do the cooking and serve it up,” Lena said.

“You pull those wagons all the way here and cook all those meals?” How had Bethany never noticed? She’d been working for the sisters, three days a week, for over two months. She had no idea this was where the sisters went on other weekdays. You’d think she would have noticed something. Or asked. She felt ashamed of herself. And yet it was baffling to Bethany too. How could the sisters live in a home of such clutter and chaos, yet have the wherewithal to plan and execute such a purposeful event, once a week, week after week?

Sylvia read the look on her face and answered her question
as if she had asked it. “We’d rather be out, doing things for others, than fussing with a silly house.”

“Sometimes, it takes two trips to get the wagons to the Grange Hall kitchen,” Sylvia said. “But it’s good exercise for us. It’s a long day. We usually get here by nine and spend the morning chopping and cutting and cooking. The kitchen opens up from twelve to one, then there’s cleanup.”

“But why hasn’t anyone been helping you?” It was the Plain way for neighbor to help neighbor. It was what they did best.

From the look on Sylvia’s face, the thought never crossed her mind. “It started small enough that we could manage ourselves. And then, as it got bigger, we kept finding new ways to manage. Besides, it’s summertime and farming families are busy.”

“Where do you get the food?” Bethany asked.

“We get most from the Lancaster County Food Bank,” Sylvia explained. “Some things, like this pork butt, are donated by the butcher on Main Street. The Bent N’ Dent gives us their canned goods that are too bent and dented to sell. The Sweet Tooth Bakery gives us their day-old pastries. Some things are from our own garden.”

The sisters had a system for getting things in the kitchen from the wagon. They lined up along the stairs like an assembly line and passed items along. Ella had a little canvas chair and put things in the chair, then dragged the chair with her cane across the threshold and into the kitchen. She used her cane to prop open the refrigerator. Remarkably resourceful, these ladies were.

Today, Bethany took care of the lifting. The Grange Hall kitchen was starkly clean. A whiff of Clorox lingered in the air—Bethany could see the tile floor had been recently
swabbed. Utensils were neatly hung on hooks. The pots and pans, battered and sturdy, in every imaginable variety, were stacked below the countertop and on the shelves around the room.

Sylvia had a system for everything. She had gone through a certification process with the Board of Health so she knew what she should serve and how to keep the kitchen sanitary. Bethany realized that she must’ve started this soup kitchen when she was in her late seventies. Amazing! Mammi Vera was only in her mid-sixties and acted like she needed full-time tending.

Soon, the kitchen was humming. On the stove in big pots were sautéed onions and green peppers. In another pot was the pork butt in a braising liquid. As Bethany chopped onions, she glanced out the window now and then at the girls from the Group Home, sitting in the shade at the picnic table. They seemed so . . . apathetic.

By noon, they had set tables with plastic spoons and forks and napkins, stirred up the sugary punch the sisters had created and added Dr Pepper to it, and Sylvia opened the doors.

In walked the girls from next door, the five from the picnic bench and four more. The two knots of girls sat far apart from each other. A handful of old men walked in, a few families, and a single mother with three toddlers. There were the homeless, of course, wearing too many layers of clothes, none too clean, and young drifters and runaways, pierced and tattooed, their eyes hungry.

Bethany had no idea there were so many down-and-outers in need in Stoney Ridge. How had she not noticed? It wasn’t easy for her to see them or to smell them. The musty scent of unwashed bodies nearly choked her. After a while, she grew
used to it, though now and then a whiff of someone sorely in need of a bath and a bar of soap hit her hard, and she turned away by faking a cough. It shamed her, but it was the truth. She wished for hot showers and soft beds for them.

After everyone found a seat, Sylvia insisted on a word from the Lord. “Jesus gave you this day,” she said. “He didn’t have to do that, but he did. So now we are going to hear his words.” Everyone bowed their heads as she read a few verses from the Sermon on the Mount.

“Amen!” an older black man shouted out, after she read that the poor would be blessed. “Amen for that blessing, Sister Sylvia! Praise the Lord!”

Accustomed to the man’s enthusiasm, Sylvia gave a nod to Bethany to start serving the paper plates. She liked to control the portions, so each plate received the same amount of food: two slices of pork, mashed potatoes, green beans, a slice of watermelon. People could have seconds, she said, if they asked.

Bethany took plates to the table of girls from the Group Home. They looked at her with blank stares and took the plates without even a thank-you. Do you realize how hard these old sisters are working? she wanted to ask them. Do you even care?